Tuesday Structured Recovery Evenings are suspended until 12th September 2017

I know I've got to do it myself, but ...

Most people now accept that there is no single outside influence, either
personal or chemical, which will magically and passively relieve anxiety
disorders. That is, a person suffering in this way has to go through
getting better, they cannot just be better. Looking at
the work involved, and the fact that we are going to have to do most of it
ourselves, this is not a cheering thought. But our problems do belong
to us, however tortuous the process of acquisition and regardless of the
number of people and events that helped these problems to grow. Suggesting
that someone ‘takes responsibility’ for their problems and ‘does
it themselves’ is then, theoretically, a good idea. But taking
responsibility for oneself has to be a voluntary act. Literally it
means being able and ready to respond to one’s obvious, or not so obvious,
needs. So the trouble occurs with all the difficulties that get in
between the idea and the reality.

For example (just for a start), people must be aware that their problem
is a problem and not an inevitable part of life; have the experience and
insight to make use of the facts offered about the problem and it’s
solution; and believe that they are well and strong enough to do the work
that accepting involves. So, not understanding these absolutely basic
requirements, outsiders may talk in such simplistic terms about taking responsibility
that the one who is supposed to be doing the work, seeing no actual way to
do this from their own perspective, begins to view him- or herself as some
kind of inadequate wimp instead of gaining anything from the suggestion.
So this kind of glib ‘it’s all down to you’ statement can
just lead to more anxiety and, possibly, depressive, helpless feelings too
in those it was supposed to encourage.

Many of us do not understand the subtleties of ‘doing it yourself’
and how much a person’s life, from plain poverty to horrendous emotional
problems, affects the possibility of getting a grip on that life, let alone
taking control. Also, how any change, painfully and slowly made, will
not be a final answer but just the first steps that may be obliterated if
that life hits back too hard in the future. People need to know not
only that their problems belong to them, but also that they have a sporting
chance of getting somewhere if they act on this and give up habits of avoidance
and retreating from change. It’s not easy.

So people can find it extraordinarily difficult to make the decision to
try for a better way, and it is often obvious why. Additional problems
will occur if they have strong feelings of personal worthlessness. Then,
deciding to ‘do something’ runs the risk of ‘proving’
(by their failure) that they were indeed as useless and incompetent as they
may have long suspected. Such a decision might also take them out of
their current social network, away from family and friends who are used to
them the way they are. This could reinforce other hovering terrors
like isolation and loneliness. And if they have a tendency towards
poor decision-making then the whole process of ‘deciding’ might
offer only confusion and helplessness.

The need to learn

Making a decision also means that people should have available to them
and understand the full facts about what they are giving up and what they
will then be getting into. With many people this simply isn’t
the case. We all tend to do what seems like a good idea at the time,
and a lot of this ‘good idea learning’ offered by well meaning
people (and booklets like this) could be more accurately described as ‘temporary
awareness’ - a piece of information that passes through the mind rather
than finding a home inside it. People need more than simply the facts
laid out before them for learning to take place. Learning requires
being able to relate information, ideas and events to oneself. So,
much information offered with good intentions is not going to ‘stick’
and is not really useful grounds for decision making at all. (This will be
discussed at greater length later in this booklet).

Anxiety can make sufferers literally terrified for their lives or their
mental existence when faced by situations that are not actually a serious
threat at all by the majority’s standards. But this does not
mean that a sufferer will file these ‘non-threats’ in some different
compartment to tornadoes, muggers, ferocious animals and runaway trucks that
the rest of the population would regard as ‘really frightening and
life threatening and to be avoided at all costs’. Survival is
best served by avoiding threatening situations rather than escaping from
them. That is something we all know instinctively. You take the
long way round the lion’s cage. You don’t open the door
and walk through it and trust to your fleetness of foot to save you.
Deciding to put such knowledge aside and to open the cage deliberately, even
if it houses something that everyone but you seems to find harmless, is therefore
hugely difficult and goes against very deep instincts. You might know
that theoretically ‘opening the cage’ will bring long term relief
at the cost of short term, probably extreme, discomfort; and that your version
of ‘walking round the cage’ (or avoidance) brings very short
term relief at the cost of long term handicap. But if, at that moment,
you fear for your physical or mental survival and/or your body and mind is
screaming for you to escape, your personal reality simply swamps the reality
that the rest of the world seems to adhere to - and you do what you have
to do.

People don’t consciously choose to handicap themselves of course;
but many people coming to Anxiety Care seem to have built up a set of fears
and beliefs that allows it to happen. A belief that not being particularly
good at certain things makes one totally no good, is a common one. (See Caxton’s
‘4 C’s below) Beliefs of this kind easily take hold and
are maintained by carefully filtering out anything that doesn’t confirm
them. Thus one may see people who dismiss their spontaneous kindness
and warmth and the fact that they may be liked and admired by others as ‘one-offs’
or ‘mistakes’. If the beliefs centre round feelings of
personal vileness that (this person believes) might leap out in a disgusting
way if not heavily controlled, it gets worse. Many people the charity
encounters don’t understand that evil is as evil does, not as evil
thinks about doing. (See the articles ‘Obsessional Thinking’
and ‘Guilt and Shame’ on this site). The human mind drifts into
many embarrassing and alarming back alleys at times. That is just the
way our brains work - one thought birthing another that focuses on (according
to our perception) the most important or frightening element of the first,
and that thought drawing another one, and so on. Everyone does it,
but the majority recognise the random, odd, embarrassing debris that occurs
for what it is and dismiss it as irrelevant. However, some people feel
so guilty and out of control of their minds all the time that they see their
‘bad’ thoughts, tossed up in this way, as further proof of their
awfulness and try even harder to lock them away. This simply makes
the ‘badness’ too concentrated and important as it roars and
complains behind it’s locked door, trying to get back to it’s
rightful place as a small (but valid) part of the whole that makes up a personality.
Experiencing the mental fuss and torment, a person trapped in this way easily
sees this bluster as proof of the rightness of their fear and snaps another
lock on the door; not understanding that if they hadn’t tried to force
the ‘badness’ away in the first place it would simply have settled
down without a whimper (or not much of one) and soon become what it was supposed
to be, a small interesting shade in a multi coloured mind.

Learning about oneself

One really easy way of making ‘doing it yourself’ difficult
is not understanding what comprises ‘me’. Anxiety Care
encounters many anxiety sufferers who have accepted other people’s
values (usually a parent or some significant ‘other’) and have
made these their own despite all evidence to the contrary thrown up by their
own lives. This is particularly clear with women who have good track
records as wives and mothers but who harbour the belief, picked up from somewhere
else, that if their ‘real’ selves were allowed freedom they would
be wanton or in some way fall into ridicule and humiliation.

A particular case springs to mind: A woman who offered words and
phrases that were probably used on her when she was six or less as ‘proof’
that she was a bad person and not acceptable in civilised society.
The problems that were giving her so much misery and pain all came under
three general ‘wisdom of a bad mother’ headings: ‘Nice
girls do not have libido’; ‘mummy will know if you do wrong’;
‘mummies have no responsibility to teach or inform, so any mistakes
you make are through your own badness, ignorance and fault and will put mummy
in an early grave’.

The problems festering under this outlook might well have raised eyebrows
if recounted by a child, but were almost totally irrelevant to a mature,
married woman. It looked as if she had locked away the ‘facts’
about what constituted a ‘good girl’ so long ago and so completely
that they had never gained from being filtered through her adult self’s
wider perception of the world. An extra complication was that this
woman tended to see much of the ‘nastiness’ she couldn’t
allow in herself, in those around her. This distortion served to ensure
that she never obtained a true picture of people and so was never in a position
to work out what was wrong with her philosophy and how it made it difficult
for people to relate to her. In effect, her social problems were a
direct response to a false ‘truth’ rather than proof of its correctness.
Taking responsibility for her own problems and ‘doing it herself’
was going to take more effort and involve more change than most of us would
be willing to face.

Another case involves a young woman who described an appalling history
of parental abuse and neglect. Most of her learning was also of a very
negative, childlike kind: ‘Adult males hurt you when you’re naughty
and you don’t know when you have been naughty so you have to be careful
all the time’; ‘I am stupid, selfish and worthless’; ‘I
must make no attempt to be assertive and to do the things I want to do’;
‘daddy is always right’. (It seemed that daddy liked power and
control). There was a lot more of the same, all negative and all leading
to very understandable feelings of worthlessness and insecurity in this young
woman. To her, even small challenges were a threat. It was easier
(and safer) for her to accept the false ‘truth’, filter out anything
to the contrary and live that way. It was bad but it was familiar.
She learned to survive at least. The alternative of seeking out kind, decent
companions when she had no experience of the breed at all, but only the word
of others that they existed, was to risk a new kind of pain and rejection.
She already knew that life was hard, so seeking out new ways to live (to
her ways to be further hurt) required more courage and faith than could reasonably
be expected.

In her situation, an understandable mistrust of the world and the pain
and confusion of her very nice self’s attempt to lead a life that suited
her true needs, had laid the ground for panic attacks and agoraphobic symptoms.
Anyone responding to her anxiety by patiently explaining that the worlds
isn’t dangerous and that she had to take responsibility for her life
would be showing ignorance and expecting miracles.

The problem of bad learning

At the heart of the problem of much anxiety/depression is bad learning
that produces false beliefs. As Smail (1984) says, these lead people
to fear that they will be overwhelmed by the world (as an agoraphobic might
feel); or do something so despicable that everyone will be disgusted (as
with many social phobics); or that they are responsible for the safety of
others or need to perform lengthy ritual actions to get them correct (as
seen with many obsessive/compulsive disorders). These strongly embedded
behaviour patterns cannot be given up easily. Appealing to reason or
providing worthy books on anxiety management and personal growth will make
very little difference.

As Smail continues, in this situation, being agoraphobic, deciding that
the world should be avoided, might be a logical response. The problem
is that the price is so high. A decision then to reject the anxiety
problems and take steps to get back into the real world doesn’t necessarily
mean that this person has begun to see the world as less dangerous or more
attractive. It might only mean that the cost in lost freedom, family
pain and (probably), an overwhelming sense of self-disgust can no longer
be borne. If the latter is true, this is not a very good way to approach
major life changes. Learning is a difficult process sometimes. And
in the interaction between ‘Teacher and Taught’, it is very easy
indeed for the challenge of learning to turn into a threat. Even trained
and experienced professional teachers can miss that crucial point when a
challenge to open up to new things becomes too much and the students begin
to feel overwhelmed and threatened. In this state, people switch off and
start to react to all attempts to urge more work with confusion, anxiety
and hostility. So it could be useful here to look at the problems of
learning about life changes as it relates to ‘doing it ourselves’.

Beliefs about what constitutes ‘me’, in any of us (as briefly
mentioned earlier), and our willingness to accept anything that goes against
them is obviously not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ area.
All of us have a sliding scale of ‘truth’ ranging from ‘indisputably
true’ through to ‘probably true, but I’m open to discussion’.
How well we learn depends on how many of the things that need changing in
us are locked behind the ‘absolutely’ door and how long ago the
door was locked. If we locked it a long time ago we might be clinging
to a child’s truth (with the tenacity and single mindedness of a child),
or a truth that is not relevant to current situations. In ‘Live
and Learn’ (1984), Caxton lists his ‘4 C’s’.
These are general anti-learning factors that affect many people who come
to Anxiety Care.

COMPETENCE: I believe that my value as a person depends on my
doing everything right.

CONSISTENCY: I believe that I must be what I think I am or
I cannot survive as a person.

CONTROL: I believe that my survival and/or sanity depends on
my being able to understand, explain or predict what is happening in my world
all the time.

COMFORT: I believe that it should be possible to get
through life without being anxious or upset or guilty, and anything that
threatens this belief is terrible and makes life hardly worth living.

As Caxton continues, the person who sees competence as vitally important
is unlikely to be willing to let go of ‘absolute’ truths
and risk ‘failing’ in the face of the struggle and doubt that
goes with learning. If consistency is paramount, this person will not
risk trying new ways or new ideas because these mean thinking or acting along
lines that don’t fit with the theory of ‘this is me’.
This is a major problem, particularly amongst those who fear their personal
‘awfulness’ escaping. Control may be lost in crossing the
‘no-mans land’ between the security and comfort of current knowledge
and understanding and accepting new knowledge (a frightening task for all
of us whether we suffer from severe anxiety or not). This will be aggravated
if the person needs outside help to make sense of this new knowledge.
Comfort will be threatened by all of these and will be multiplied by any
present tendency towards severe anxiety.

For a person in whom these ‘4 C’s’ are strongly held,
any learning that threatens them is an attack on the frightened inner person,
making the learning process intolerably anxiety raising. Such a person
then retreats into denying or avoiding the need to learn; basically escaping
in any way he or she can from yet another situation that is threatening.
Such negative feelings can close people off from ‘going out’
or ‘doing something’ before they have a chance to open up to
the idea. Such people have learned to have a very fast and very large
‘drawbridge’ to protect their inner selves from new learning
or new experience or, sometimes, even minor stress. Some people become
so over protective of themselves that the drawbridge smashes shut at the
first rustling in the bushes. They hide away in their anxiety castle
imagining the terrors outside, whether they are there or not. Then
everything becomes a major problem and ‘do-it-yourself’ is impossible.

A first step on the way out of this situation is to accept that the anxiety
reactions are not attributable to external factors such as ‘infection’
or ‘life’s cruelties’. On the contrary, they were
probably adopted because, at the time, they really did seem a good survival
choice. They kept the world’s nastiness at bay, or one’s
feared awfulness in, and allowed this person to live some kind of life.
They may have been a useful defensive tool that was picked up for a purpose,
albeit probably not consciously; and as it was a choice, this person can
choose again - to put it down now that it is no longer useful and, in fact,
comprises a handicap in itself. The trick is to find out how to put
it down and as Caxton and others suggest, there are many ways this could
be achieved. Here are a few:

By accepting that opening up beliefs about oneself to question, doubt
and experience can feel like (and sometimes is) a big risk, but one that
needs to be taken.

By accepting learning, not struggling and fighting to learn, but letting
the drawbridge down a notch, just enough to let learning in.

By accepting that ‘nasty’ or ‘dangerous’ feelings
are part of a person too (and nowhere near as big a part as they feel).
That they are something to be accepted as a needed part of the whole, not
something to be ‘cured’.

By recognising how the 4 C’s affect us and by accepting that
suffering will be caused when they are attacked. And that this is to
be expected. And that this is bearable.

By accepting that the need ‘to understand the fear’ is
a symptom of the effect it is having, not an answer to the problem.

By accepting that the problem, and oneself, are not trivial or silly.

By trying to understand what is really going on, not what bad learning
and habit tells us is probably going on.

By becoming aware of the true cost to us of the anxiety disorder.

By putting oneself in any environment (like one or more of the Anxiety
Care services) where defensive, avoiding, denying and self-crippling behaviour
is inappropriate and doesn’t work.

By questioning the inner voice that cries ‘run or die!’
in response to the slightest threat.

By accepting that one needs only start by coping with anxiety - not
getting rid of it altogether.

By accepting that we may be suffering this way because it helped us
to avoid making a huge and terrifying decision. Caught between two
or more scary alternatives required by our life, an inability to act because
we are ‘ill’ can sometimes seem the only way out (though probably
not a decision consciously made). If this is what is happening, a person
stuck in this way needs to focus on the original problem rather than the
symptomatic anxiety.

In effect, people suffering in this way have to understand that their
sensitivity to feeling out of control, uncomfortable and incompetent is not
pleasant, but neither is it terminal. They may well have to face more
of the same in order to be free of the problem, and this is not going to
kill them or drive them crazy either.

A case study in bad learning and the many sides of ‘truth’

This client, a single woman in her early thirties, describes having been
drawn into her parents marital problems at a very early age. From her
viewpoint, they appeared to be immersed in themselves, seeing her as just
another wedge to shore up their marriage. She felt that she was expected
to keep her younger brothers amused and out of the way in order to give her
parents time together; and was continually rebuked for being ungrateful and
selfish, and a ‘baby’ when she expressed fears about her competence
to do this. She further felt that she had been required to accept her
parents ‘little weaknesses’ (her words), such as father’s
heavy drinking and violence and mother’s depression, and to be the
family anchor - all while she was still at primary school.

While this scenario probably did take place much as described, and is
almost certainly the cause of the disabling anxiety in this young woman,
we must be aware with stories like these that there are many aspects to ‘truth’.
So a point should be considered here about this: When listening to ourselves
and other people recount the past, it is essential to understand that this
is a very personal version of ‘the truth’. With this young woman,
the past is the memory it has for her now, probably showing herself in the
most favourable light. The events recounted are beliefs, not an accurate
record. They are what ‘must have happened’ to her, casting
her characters in the roles that best suit such wounding responses.
Her younger brothers might tell a very different story of that time - describe
parents that are hardly recognisable as the same people.

Saying that, does not mean that this young woman is lying, or that siblings
describing these events would have been telling the ‘whole truth’
about those days and those parents. The fact is, we do tend to treat
our children differently. But this does not necessarily mean deliberate
cruelty or neglect, or even playing favourites. Some children’s
personalities might not fit comfortably with their parents’ needs for
them to be very much like them, for example, or easily manipulated or even
the ‘right’ sex. The negative parental response to such
differences on the child’s part could cause such a child much pain
and unhappiness. In the case above, it could also be that she saw her father
in such a bad light because she never dared to stand up to him. So
she would never see him as anything but a drunken tyrant. What is more,
her story would not relate everything that went on, only that part of the
experience and pain that she, at such a young age, was aware of or could
understand.

However, whatever the situation, there is no doubt of the anxiety, pain
and confusion that this young woman experienced as a child. But happily
(albeit slowly) she is beginning to look at her life and find ways to ‘do-it-herself’.
She is learning not to listen to the words, or to accept what ‘must
be true’. She is watching what the important people in her life (including
herself) are actually doing, not what they say they are doing. She
is beginning to be suspicious of her own ‘absolute’ beliefs and
certainties. She is making ready to accept that her blanket view of herself
as stupid, selfish, to blame for everything and being (still) childishly
inept, has tainted her view of the world for years. She is just beginning
to accept how much energy she has wasted defending these beliefs when her
own needs and feelings were in conflict with them. She is becoming
aware of how much of herself has gone into denying, evading and running away
from problems. She is realising how much better it would have been if this
energy had gone into solving her problems. She is angry. But
for the first time in a long time, she is not angry with herself or a specific
‘other’, but at the waste.

Much of the learning required for this kind of recovery can be found within
the Anxiety Care services: that is, discussion and observation as a member
of support, recovery and/or confidence building groups; and the more intensive
one-to-one work. People are not ‘put right’. Rarely are
there ‘thunderbolts of enlightenment’ in the various charity
services. Mostly people are helped to feel safe in the environment
and to begin to experiment with behaviour. This young woman, as an example,
has begun to realise that trying to follow other people’s rules, particularly
rules that go against one’s need to be true to oneself, just lead to
confusion, guilt, anxiety and, often, a barely acknowledged feeling of self-disgust.

So, Anxiety Care mutual support groups and their attached discussion and
recovery groups, are a good place to start the process of taking charge of
one’s life. Their benign and nurturing culture lets people know
that the consequences of feelings and of behaving in certain ways are not
automatically disastrous. Group members do not have to make the effort
to ‘teach’. Their natural responses are enough for new
members to learn, gradually, that the world won’t collapse if they
say ‘no’; or if they are spontaneous, or not over sympathetic
or over caring. Members do not need their behaviour explained or interpreted;
and they don’t need to be deeply questioned or mentally ‘pulled
apart’ in the guise of helping. This is always basic within such
groups.

However, people like this young woman have missed out on a great deal
of caring and nurturing in their lives - more than any group could hope to
replace. Anxiety Care does not expect to watch people change their
lives hugely (although it has happened). We understand that any
worthwhile change has to be built up slowly on good, solid foundations.
So it is unlikely that group members will actually witness a filling of the
‘caring void’. A good group understands this and continues
to work, becoming expert at sighting small changes and nurturing growth.

One thing the groups do not do is to encourage anger over the past. Natural
rage as a temporary and cleansing thing is fine, but focusing on it can easily
lead down blind alleys of ‘me and why I feel so bad’.

It is very easy for an anger-focus to turn into self-indulgence: picking
over old hurts and concentrating on behaviour rather than the meaning of
behaviour. It is also easy to become lost in a ‘search for the
villain’. Immersion in the helplessness and rage of feeling wronged
is an oddly attractive and comforting activity and many people never struggle
free of it. Taking responsibility for oneself has to include accepting
the wounds others have inflicted upon us. It is not possible to go
through childhood wound free - that’s just a fact of being human.
(One Anxiety Care counsellor states that he has never encountered anyone,
inside or outside the charity, healthy or not, who could not make a
case for being ‘barking mad’ if they set their mind to it.)

So wounds have to be accepted within oneself as examples of our and others’
bad learning or lack of insight or lack of experience of love. People
do rotten things through their own pain, or malice or ignorance, or self-involvement,
or just because they can. As Fromm says, some people have never encountered
a loving person or are so narcissistic that they barely accept the existence
of others in the world. It’s nasty, it’s sad, but trying
to apportion blame is a pointless and endless task. Somebody did something
to you. Who did something to them to make it likely that they would
do something to you? How far back do you go? Grandparents? Great
Grandparents? And if by chance you found the villain, what then?
Finding a reason does not take the pain away. Further, it is often
used to stop the effort of recovery as if such a discovery was an end in
itself. ‘Why?’ can be so complicated and/or multi-faceted; so
much caught up in events, reactions, tendencies, chance, personality etc.,
that no single ‘reason’ can ever be fully isolated.

So ‘doing it oneself’ has to include many things. It
means accepting that we have to forgive (but not forget) the people involved
in the making of the wounded self (and that includes our own culpability).
This means, as Smail says, that we have to accept that all the people we
have collided with in life are caught up in illusion: The illusion
that we know why we do what we do; The illusion that our actions are reasonable,
rational, logical, well intentioned and justified most of the time; The illusion
that what we do is occasioned by personal choice rather than understanding
the extent to which fear, anxiety, and unconscious acceptance of other people’s
values colour all our actions. As Smail continues, doing it oneself has to
include accepting that being helped to examine what one wants to be isn’t
going to generate lasting change. Change needs reinforcing every step
of the way; and the bigger the needed changes, the harder it will be and
the longer it will take. Finding worthwhile goals may well initiate
and direct behaviour, but it won’t sustain it. People don’t
change easily or by trying to think themselves different. People need
to see the way these changes affect the manner in which others relate to
them and regard them. It means getting well around other people, not in isolation.
It means very specifically accepting that relationships do, (and need to),
grow and change. It means accepting that this movement in relationships
may throw up problems itself; but these are likely to be ‘normal’
events that can be seen as different from anxiety based difficulties and
so, something that can be a healthy signpost to a better something else;
Not something that needs to be viewed with foreboding or suspicion.

It can be hugely difficult, sometimes virtually impossible, to absorb
new ideas and experiences if they cannot be linked with current ones.
If the tools of recovery in the form of information and help are available
but a person feels unable to apply them, then this doesn’t mean a need
for more knowledge or a better therapist (and perhaps an excuse to procrastinate
a bit longer), rather it shows a need to find ways to make existing knowledge
link in with the self or to find a deeper, more relevant meaning to what
is already known. Mostly, it means accepting that there is a big difference
between being in possession of information and using it to change the way
we behave and relate to the world. Most difficult of all, doing-it-oneself
may mean accepting that some of the wounds will never heal.

Balance

One perceptual change may need to be in the area of ‘ balance’.
We all have ‘balance’ in our lives. Those inner scales
that weigh every action: Do I? Don’t I? Staying in a warm bed
is very attractive on a cold morning, but the children need feeding; or I
might get sacked if I don’t get up. Those clothes on the shop
rail are beautiful, but food or an unpaid bill is more important.

Most of us are socialised or ‘civilised’ to such a degree
that the many personally preferable alternatives in every-day actions are
hardly considered; and these alternatives themselves are usually so minor
or so well understood that real conflict does not occur. However, this
social balance is quickly lost when severe anxiety surfaces. ‘Going
shopping’ may suddenly feel so terrifying that only pending starvation
makes a ’balance’ possible. ‘Travelling on the Underground’
is so terrible that only the fear of losing our livelihood keeps us doing
it; and sometimes not even that. Suddenly, the balances have gone wrong
after years of barely acknowledging them.

To many people this is terrifyingly incomprehensible. Reality seems
to have changed and that is frightening for anyone, as we all rely hugely
on our unconscious beliefs that some things just ‘are’.
When some of these ‘absolutes’ change - usually to our detriment
- we begin to lose faith in all the rest. Doubting personal abilities
becomes a chronic habit very quickly. In terms of balance this invariably
means a great deal more weight on our side to make, sometimes, the simplest
every-day activities possible. Doubt and fear leaps to the mind and fills
the places that our adult confidence used to be so comfortable with that
we barely noticed it. This is very apparent with driving a car for
example. People who have driven for many years, because of their growing
anxiety condition, suddenly feel they have to think about every driving movement
to ensure that it is correct. So of course it becomes stilted, awkward
‘wrong’ and so additionally frightening. Casual belief in our
own eyes and our reflexes that we will avoid killing pedestrians with our
car is lost. Every bump in the road is a dead child. Suddenly,
‘driving’ becomes monstrously dangerous and unbalanced to a degree
that may make it impossible.

In this way, in the clutches of an anxiety disorder, our revised and erroneous
belief in what constitutes balance means that many things in life have to
be brought to a crisis level before they ‘weigh enough’ to counter
the huge, feared weight on the other side. This makes life hard and
exhausting. There are countless stories within Anxiety Care of people
who live like this every day. It is a salute to human kind’s
flexibility and endurance that most of these sufferers’ families or
co-workers are completely ignorant of the fact that they live this way.
One of the charity’s main areas of work is in helping to redress these
imbalances. However, it is vitally important for anyone considering
an attempt to counter their anxiety disorder through personal effort to be
aware of their own balances when they begin. Attending a group or counselling
may involve much effort and courage. It is then too easy to demand
(subconsciously) an equal balance of benefit in return. However unrealistic,
part of us in such a situation, requires a huge payment as balance for all
that anxiety. Inevitably it doesn’t happen. But understanding
the situation, armed with knowledge about the inequity we will feel, means
that we are able to overcome the disappointment and try again next week.
Ignorant of our wrong balance, we just feel let down or cheated and don’t
come again. This leads to ‘butterflying’ where sufferers
dip in to one new thing after another because only the phoney balance of
unrealistic expectation (the fantasy of passive cure) makes all that
effort worthwhile.

A version of this is that many people coming to Anxiety Care have unrealistic
hopes and beliefs about their future. They tend to feel that unless
a full happy life is guaranteed as balance for the work, then the work won’t
be done. This is understandable, as the work load can look incredibly
daunting, but it is foolish. Anxiety cannot be removed from a person’s
mind, because it has survival value in everyone’s life. But it can
be reduced to a point where normal life is possible and pleasant. There
is no guarantee that there won’t be setbacks. The body and mind
has found a successful way to shut down when it feels threatened and cannot
be expected to give up this skill. The problem is that the strategies
we use to defend ourselves from life also prevent us from using our potential
to improve.

This potential for being so much more than we appear to be is clear in
many clients the charity encounters. Many people put on a ‘fake’
competence for a few important people in their lives. They are often
very convincing, but it doesn’t seem to occur to many of them that
the fact that they can act competent (however much effort this takes), means
that the knowledge of how to be competent people must exist in their ability
bank somewhere. Their personalities must, to some extent, match this
knowledge or the act would not be so convincing. People need to understand
that their ‘self’ is actually made up of a multitude of different
elements including the things they pretend to be as well as (possibly) the
things they fear they are. People are not set and rigid but have multifaceted
personalities and possess the ability to change in all manner of ways.
Once this is accepted, then real growth can begin.

Accepting this is crucial, but it can be nasty and full of pitfalls for
the budding confidence to look around inside ourselves. As Pessoa once
said ‘In every corner of my soul there is an altar to a different God’;
And some of these Gods can be very strange indeed: meanness and cruelty;
selfishness and childish rage and some things we cannot even bear to poke
with a long stick. Looking at our inner selves, armed with dissatisfaction,
growth and positive change can look like (and is) a job for life. It
is then very easy to become caught up in the belief that the only spur to
change is dissatisfaction with ourselves; that we have to hate, or be disgusted
with, our current selves to make it work. If we fall into this trap
we are simply setting up more problems. Nobody is able to spend the rest
of their lives loathing themselves and still stay on top of things enough
to get by. Pretty soon, this untenable feeling leads to hiding the
causes again or simply denying their existence. Then the nastiness
is reburied and free to fester away to its hearts content. Far better
to be brave enough to love oneself, understanding that positive change can
only seed in that kind of soil.

Most of us fall over ourselves to be kind to downtrodden others, but treat
our fragile inner selves with a cruelty that would keep the Court of Human
Rights busy for all eternity. Nelson-Jones (1984) lists some mitigating
circumstances that we might all bear in mind when tempted to bring out the
mental stick to use against this ‘self’.

Our thinking processes mature slowly and lag behind what we need to
make sense of the world.

Our very long dependency period as children, combined with slow mental
development and a need for security, makes us prey to swallowing self-defeating
beliefs from adults.

Simply being human makes us very open to conditioning to irrational
fears.

Our need to feel secure by making consistent sense out of the world
is probably stronger that our need to see the world as it is and to process
incoming information accordingly.

Our brains are simply lagging behind what we need, to deal with an
increasingly complex world.

All that might not bring us a ‘not guilty’ verdict, but the
least we can expect is that we will let ourselves off with a caution.
Having said that however, anyone suffering from anxiety knows that we often
compromise with our anxiety restrictions. Not to put too fine a point on
it, we tend to be as fettered as we allow ourselves to be.

Some people will find that statement outrageous. But it is true.
Anxiety is not like pregnancy or measles. It is not linear. There
is no inevitability about it’s process. Anxiety presses up against
the edges of one’s life and quickly takes up any space allowed to it.
However, it’s very flexibility means that it can be pushed back too.
So, a diagram of a person’s incapacity would look like a coastline
- all inlets, bays and out-jutting cliffs. No straight lines. In this
situation, it is not at all unusual for people’s incapacity to be incomprehensible
(and therefore suspect) to outsiders who expect straight lines and continuity
of the measles/pregnancy type. So outsiders might find it difficult to understand
that it is perfectly possible to find someone who cannot walk to the corner
shop, but can drive a car into the next county without a tremor. Or
somebody who cannot walk within thirty feet of a gas pipe outside, but passes
within three feet of his own gas pipes at home all the time.

Discussing such disparities in handicap often reveals a version of ‘balancing’
that the sufferer has negotiated with him- or herself. That is, some areas
of life are so vital to maintain for this person that they reject the incapacity
in that area to maintain this viability (like the gas pipes above).
Anyone conversant with anxiety disorder would not find this strange.
However, it does throw up a solid fact: that it can be controlled if the
need is great enough. In other words, the anxiety is only as containing
as we allow it to be and under some circumstances we can pull some of our
life back.

There are two problems with this. One is that we cannot live at crisis
level all the time as mentioned earlier. In that case we have to work
at reducing the weight on the opposing side or increasing the weight on our
side (in a non-destructive way) to obtain balance. Increasing our side in
a way that doesn’t involve a crisis could be via determination, motivation
and positive attitude. Decreasing the other side could be through familiarity
breeding less fear each time the anxiety-generating situation occurs; more
accurate perception of the feared situation; and more understanding of the
physical symptoms.

The other, related, problem is that many sufferers do not have the energy
available to do the work needed within their current life situation.
They are, quite literally, already working to their perceived physical and
mental limit. Within the Groups this is described as being so busy
not drowning that they do not strike out for the shore. The difficulty
with this is that if staying afloat does not involve an active effort to
go somewhere, a person drowns eventually. It is vital, therefore, that
a person suffering in this way accepts help that will increase their perceived
abilities to counter the problem. While simply staying afloat is the
only goal, recovery is not possible. A person has to be brave enough to take
a chance and invest some energy in recovery work.

From Anxiety Care’s experience, people are stronger than they believe
they are. Once they increase their focus to include a positive future,
there is invariably some small amount of energy that can be harnessed in
the service of recovery. To start, it only has to be a small amount.
Sometimes, if a person simply draws a metaphorical line across his or her
life: a straight line that will not allow anxiety restrictions to creep in
any further, it is a beginning. Stretching the coastline metaphor a
little, this could be seen as a dam that will not allow anxiety to take any
more space. It doesn’t take any back for a while, but it stops the
encroachment. Once a person realises that they can, in fact, deny further
restrictions in their life, the confidence starts to grow.

Attitude has a major part to play then. People who have gone through severe
anxiety disorders and come out the other side often mention a curious fact.
That recovery started, not with a reduction in symptoms, but with a change
in attitude on their part towards these symptoms. That is, the feared
response or situation still occurred but the usual self-recriminating, self-pitying
feelings this invariably generated, did not, or not to the same extent, once
recovery was underway.

One of Anxiety Care’s trainers uses ‘The Hamster Weekend’
as an example of this. Staying at a friend’s home for two nights,
he had to share the only bed space with a large hamster in a cage.
At bedtime, the hamster was happy and alert, hurtling round in its wheel,
hanging from the roof bars, generally ready to start it’s nocturnal
day. The trainer was tired and irritated. He lay in his bed and
cursed the creature for keeping him awake, and cursed it again every time
it woke him during the night. The following day he was tired and bad
tempered and feeling sorry for himself. That night he went up to bed
again to see the same energy filled hamster regarding him from behind the
bars. However, this time he felt differently. He talked to the
hamster (quietly), saying that he understood that this was the hamster’s
space; that night was the hamster’s time, but he hoped the creature
would keep the noise down a bit. It didn’t; but the trainer’s
attitude was different. He didn’t allow anger or resentment to
keep him awake, or fuel him when he was woken again on several occasions
during the night. The actual hours asleep were not different, but that
second day at his friend’s he was relaxed and content.

Not a major landmark in anyone’s life, but personal versions of
such a ‘hamster weekend’ can make a huge difference to the way
anxiety ‘bites’. Here a good group can help. It is
not at all unusual for members of a recovery group to laugh about their anxiety
responses as they recount a week’s happenings. An outsider might be
forgiven for thinking these people had lost touch with reality; but such
a response by group members is a vital and positive one. Getting away
from the endless loop of fear and catastrophic thinking - throwing an amused
or ridiculing light on the gloom begins to show it for what it is: irrelevant.
Rigid, fearful, almost superstitious responses fuel anxiety. Open,
calm discussion puts it in it’s place.

One concluding point: None of this booklet was written as an attempt to
arm people with all they need to know about setting themselves and others
right. Successfully taking charge of oneself does not mean swallowing
theories whole and being led around by the nose. Anyone who is that
malleable is very unlikely to stick to ‘new truth’ once the influence
of the group, or therapist, or booklet has gone. Success is developing
in one’s own way, forming relationships with others and coming to terms
with what we are, while giving up the belief that we can ‘cut out’
the bits of ourselves we don’t like. It’s a big job by
anyone’s standards. Good luck!

Source material and references

This booklet grew out of ideas and techniques, the sources of which, in
many cases, are long forgotten, but will definitely owe a lot to the work
of Smail (whose insightful work forms the basis for much of this article);
Fromm and Caxton. A few of those not forgotten are listed below. Any
author who feels that he or she has been left out or wrongly cited should
contact Anxiety Care with the required changes which will be made as soon
as is possible. All readers are requested to note that this is a non-profit
publication and that it is also not a substitute for medical advice.